hackaday.com Archives - 25 April 2013, Thursday

If you’ve lost interest in that DVB dongle you bought to give software defined radio a try you should bust it back out. [Harrison Sand] just finished a guide on how to use SDR to listen in on Police and Fire radio bands . The project, which results in the crystal clear audio reception...

Say goodbye to the rest of your day. Here are the top 10 best videos about real hacking. We’ve already covered the absolute worst that hollywood has to offer, twice . Then, we did the best that hollywood could pull off . Now we’re enjoying the real thing. Feast your eyes on hacking as...

His coffee maker sits right next to the fridge, which has its own water supply. So one day he thought, why not run a line to the coffee maker as well? As far as plumbing projects go it’s very simple. He pulled out the refrigerator and added a T-fitting to split the water supply line. ...

Whenever I release a hackaday video, I invariably get comments and emails about my workbench. Some people are telling me to clean up, others are asking me about things they see in the background. This isn’t just a set that I film on. Obviously my videos aren’t high enough quality for ...

How lucky is [Transistor Man] that he found the materials for the tracks of this curved camera dolly just lying around the shop? The three rails making up the system are quarter-inch diameter and he was able to bend them by hand with the help of a 55 gallon drum. But to hold them in p...

[Martin Melchior] wanted to use an older Sigma lens with his Canon camera . The problem in trying to do so is that the camera uses a different communications protocol than the lens is expecting. But if you don’t mind cracking it open and doing a little microcontroller work you’ll be u...

Main system control is provided by a Teens 2.0 board. If you look really closely you’ll see the SD card slot is actually a breakout board which mounts on top of the Teensy’s pinheaders. Also on the board is a PA6B GPS module with a few passive components to support it. The back side o...

There have been a ton of commercials for the new [Tom Cruise] movie called Oblivion . One of the main points in every clip we remember seeing is the Top Gun meets Star Trek vehicle he does some tricks in. [James Cotton] loved that footage and ended up building his own RC version of th...

To get the most power possible he searched around for a massive relay and found one which was originally meant for telephone exchanges. He cut the case open and strapped a big bar magnet to the side of the coil. Next he fabricated an arm which will press against the relay’s lever. To ...

OTM stands for Open source Time Machine. It’s the work of [Hairy Kiwi] and he managed to bring the guts of the watch in at a thickness between 6.5 and 7mm. That includes the LCD, PCB, piezo diaphragm, and the battery. The PCB itself is a four-layer board built on 1mm thick substrate. ...

Continuing with our series of best and worst portrayals of hacking, we’re gathering our resources to bring you the top 10 Hacking Documentaries. Again, we feel the strongest resource is the hacking community, so lets hear what you think should qualify. While it would be fantastic to o...

To each his own. My sensibilities are different. Suppose you had a beautiful old walnut grandfather clock in the family, handed down from generation to generation. Then you get it, tear out the face and guts, and install a digital clock from Radio Shack. No more noise, no more winding...

First off, the fact that it’s made for the aerospace industry means that the craftsmanship on it is simply fantastic. The enclosure is machined aluminum and all of the components are glued or otherwise attached to the boards to help them stand up to the high-vibrations often experienc...

You don’t have to search very long before you find someone raving about the Retina display used in Apple iPads. We’re not going to disagree. These 9.7″ panels pack in a whopping 2048×1536 resolution and the color is fantastic. But we were surprised to hear you can get one of these for...

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We’ve got to say it… these tubular bells sound awful! They don’t really have a tight pitch center so they sound really out of tune to us. But we think that’s the failing of the instrument itself and not the work which [Tolaemon] did to automate the instrument . There are three main pa...

First I got rid of that chunk of plastic on the end of my drill. I am referring to that drill-shank grinder that works on the same principle as “hand-tightened lugnuts”. After changing the “chuck” for a keyed Jacobs chuck, I made a chunk of wood with the key imbedded in it’s palm size...

The Nintendo Four Score was a controller attachment for the original Nintendo Entertainment System which allowed you to use four controllers at one time. [Simon Inns] wanted to use some original NES controllers on his computer so he developed a drop-in replacement board that converts ...

If you don’t mind ending up with oddly shaped 3D printed parts you can get your printer to sing to you . The exhibit shown above is doing just that. The Lulzbot is being driven specifically to produce a certain frequency of sound with its stepper motors. The results of a few different...

Not only does this mood lamp which [J. Sutton] built look great, but we love the modular design he adopted when building the circuit boards. If you’re building something that is going to sit on your desk for some time it just has to look good. We think that he achieved that, using a s...

This project is reminiscent of the old days when window managers were an amazing new idea. The difference is that this window-based GUI is running on an ATmega1284 microcontroller . But the behavior and speed of the interface is pretty much exactly what you’d expect if working on an e...

[Johna and Justin] are working to take the emotion out of playing the market. They built this piggy bank which automatically purchases stock when your coinage totals the cost of a single share. That’s right, just turn the selector to one of your three chosen stocks (Google, Facebook, ...

We like his design which uses a coin cell battery holder as the chassis for the project. The ATtiny13 driving the hardware is held in place by the two power wires. This lets him flash new firmware by rotating the chip and plugging in a little adapter he build. The LED connection might...

The recycled cells he’s talking about are pulled out of larger battery packs. As we’ve seen in the past , dead battery packs for rechargeable tools, laptops, etc., are often plagued by a few bad apples. A small number of dead cells can bork the entire battery even though many perfectl...

The hacked together apparatus is pretty ingenious. It uses two servo motors for testing, each driven by the Arduino which is logging the count on an SD card. One of the two white LEGO parts has been screwed onto an arm of the upper servo. That servo presses down onto the mating piece ...

a concept we’ve seen a few times before . The light from an LED shines through your finger and is measured on the other side by a phototransistor. It’s that light grey plastic thing you see on a patient’s finger when they’re in the hospital. [Scott] went with a common wooden clothes p...

M father, an ex Navy man, has told me stories of glowing water since I was little. Being a person who was obsessed with all things that light up this always stuck with me. I saw a headline one day that someone was making an algae-light. Sadly when I clicked on it, the algae was just t...

The machine is built in two parts. The portion in the upper left feeds components from reels and is fully automated. The portion on the lower right consists of a padded arm-rest which slides smoothly along two axes. A mechanical arm with multiple articulations is attached to the end, ...

The image above is a screenshot from the demo which you can watch after the break. The top enclosure for the blinds is just shown at the top of the frame. Here [HA] is demonstrating a few different control designs which he has been trying out. You can see what looks like a Molex conne...

His preliminary investigation of the stock components yielded a mystery uC encased in a blob of black epoxy. He wasn’t going to be getting anywhere with that, so he started by figuring out how to use 4051 multiplexers to read all of the keys. Outputs for that were routed to a 20 pin h...

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While browsing an oculus rift thread on reddit, I saw someone mention how nice it would be to have some actual mounts for external sensors on their Rift. The idea is that adding additional sensors or cameras will allow us to expand the capabilities of the rift. With something like the...